20 Cancelled Doctor Who Episodes You Need To Know About

After writing two universally-acclaimed stories for RTD1 (Father’s Day and Human Nature/The Family of Blood) Paul Cornell never returned to Doctor Who. Talk about a mic drop. But he did pitch various stories for the Moffat era.

One such story, proposed for the Twelfth Doctor, centred around a community of vampires living in contemporary London, riffing on Cornell’s own Wilderness Years novel Goth Opera.

In a dramatic twist, one of the TARDIS team would've succumbed to the bloodsuckers partway through. Initially this was Clara, but Moffat suggested instead having the transformation occur to the Doctor.

There are shades of this idea in some Twelfth Doctor stories that were produced, with Series 9 featuring two communities of aliens living in London (the Zygons and the residents of Trap Street) and evil duplicates of both the Doctor and Clara. So it’s not surprising that it never got made.

Also, vampires, or vampire-like creatures, have featured in Doctor Who before – State of Decay, Smith and Jones and The Vampires of Venice, among others. So perhaps there was a fear of retreading old ground. And let's be honest, Twilight had sort of killed the scare factor of vampires by 2014.

Still, it’s a pity. Jenna Coleman would've put in an impressive turn as vampire Clara, but Peter Capaldi as a vampire Doctor would've been something to behold. We were robbed! Robbed!